Light and Dark Images of Apocalypse - Regelson Lev - Страница 2

"No one has ever seen God" (1:18),

and which is why Moses forbade the representation of God.

However God is alive and operating. Actions, for which the Greek is "energies", of the Holy Trinity is that selfsame divine nature emanating from itself, pouring out. In its quality of energy Divine nature is visible, depictable, comprehensible and, moreover may penetrate from inside and fill human nature.

Hence, we may now understand how God could become visible. Set of the energies of the Holy Trinity forms the eternally uncreated Divine "body" which can be visible to the human eye. In this eternal embodiment of His, the One God is Jesus Christ, He is also Yahweh, He is the Ancient of Days and the One who sits on the throne. In Paradise, Adam saw Him and conversed with Him. And hence, we, employing our erroneous terms, could say that God had revealed Himself to Adam in His "human image". It would be correct though to say that man is created "in the image and likeness" of God, of Jesus Christ in His Divine body.

Lamb

The name of "The Lamb", that is repeated some thirty times in the Revelation, designates Jesus Christ as the man who sacrificed Himself to redeem us:

Jesus Christ the Lamb. Agnus Dei, Emory University, Pitts Theology Library.

“Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation…” (5:9).

For which reason St. John announces in his Revelation:

“Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing” (5:12).

Therein is all essence of Revelation: “One slained” is receiving power. The Apocalypse demonstrates the conflict between two worlds, two types of relations between personalities, two types of power and authority.

In the world of the Beast, the authority belongs to the butcher, in the world of God – to the victim.  The Apocalypse thereby reveals to us the sense of the Gospel.

People with vestiges of pagan consciousness now and again consider the character of the gospel Jesus as too soft and weak, well-nigh feminine. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus is the possessor of the utmost courage of which man is capable, yet at the same time is the bearer of genuine power. That is simply such courage and such power. Pagans will never comprehend that until directly affected by this force:

“These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for He is Lord of lords, and King of kings” (17:14).

That authority was manifested on the Cross when Jesus Christ said of his butchers:

"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).

And this word does not remain in vain, because He speaks as one that had authority: to denounce or forgive.

The forgiveness or curse that the victim utters upon his butchers, is of absolute power, for thus it is ordained by God. Only once in the New Testament, and precisely in the Revelation, there comes from the lips of the martyrs the verdict of condemnation. This occurs after the breaking of the Fifth Seal, when the souls of those "slaughtered for God's words" cry out to God:

“How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (6:10).

Indeed, something very strange and extraordinary must happen in the world for the usual entreaty victims make to forgive their butchers to yield to a cry for vengeance… It is told to them, that their requirement will be executed:

“And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled” (6:11).

By now we wonder what relationship may exist between the One who sits on the throne and the Lamb.

These two Persons often appear side by side. Thus the Lamb came to the One who sits on the throne (5:7) in absolutely the same manner as the Prophet Daniel saw in his vision when "one like the Son of man" (Dan. 7:13) comes to the Ancient of Days. Now if the One who sits on the throne is Jesus in His Divine nature, while the Lamb is Jesus in His human nature, we must perforce come to the conclusion that Jesus Christ is approaching… to Himself. How can that be possible?

At this point we cannot dispense with a brief excursus into the holy fathers theology.

The Church creed as to the relationship between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ was formed and evolved in the strenuous and long struggle against the so-called "christological heresies" that shook and rocked the Christian world in the 5th-7th centuries. The first such heresy was Monophysitism, asserted that Jesus Christ nature is only one: divine or “divine-human”, and that everything human in Him was absorbed by that of Divine. The ecumenical council of Chalcedon defined Jesus Christ to be one Person or Hypostasis (now would tell – Personality) in the two natures, one wholly divine and the other wholly human.

He is the perfect God and the perfect Man. The two natures are not merged one with another and each of natures by joining remain without alternation, keeps the fullness of it's properties.

However a large proportion of the believers embraced Monophysitism, most of them would have later accepted Islam. But the Churches of Armenia and Ethiopia profess that creed to this day. It was too hard to imagine how the God, while remaining God, also had become the man. That is not only hard, but indeed impossible to comprehend! Here we confronted the one and only, yet absolute, boundary to human intelligence: to wit, the unattainability of the Divine nature. All else is within the bounds of human intelligence, except that, because to comprehend the Divine essence – would mean to become equal with God. Only given to God is the knowledge of how He could become man. Only given to God is the knowledge of how to create the world from nothingness. Only given to God is the knowledge of foreseeing the action of freely human will. Only given to God is the knowledge in fullness of what fate holds in store for every human being. All these things are the manifestations of the Divine nature, the absolute prerogative of the Creator. Hence every attempt to penetrate the unfathomable always resulted for the human being in false fantasy of loss of faith.

After the ecumenical council of Chalcedon was emerged a new heresy, Monothelitism, which claimed:

"Let Christ have two natures but only one, divine or divine-human, will".